Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer believes President Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020 is a scenario Democrats need to take more seriously.
Pfeiffer, now co-host of Pod Save America, recently told Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman that “Democrats should be very, very worried,” about their chances of defeating President Trump.
“We have more voters than they do, but we can only win if we get them out,” the former White House communications director said. “Complacency hurt Democrats last time because we assumed Trump would lose.”
This is not the first time Pfeiffer has gone against conventional “resistance” thinking. In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, the podcaster admitted he saw no viable path to removing the president from office other than through the ballot box. Reminiscing on President Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceeding, Pfeiffer said contemporary congressional Republicans are too loyal to remove President Trump. “Nixon went down because a number of Republican senators told him that they were going to convict him on the impeachment,” he said. “There is no world in which that happens with today’s Republican party. They will not do that. The only way Trump will leave office is voters sending him home.”
The former senior Obama adviser is not the only high-profile political figure who thinks President Trump can win the White House again. Mitt Romney in June predicted President Trump would “easily” win his party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and “solidly” win a second term. Romney, the GOP’s failed 2012 presidential nominee from Massachusetts, now a Republican Senate candidate in Utah, made the prediction as he welcomed dozens of high-profile business and political leaders to a mountainside retreat.
The future, he predicted, would feature Trump as America’s leader at least for another six years. “I think that not just because of the strong economy and the fact that people are going to see increasingly rising wages,” Romney said, “but I think it’s also true because I think our Democrat friends are likely to nominate someone who is really out of the mainstream of American thought and will make it easier for a president who’s presiding over a growing economy.”
In February, President Donald Trump named former digital adviser Brad Parscale as campaign manager of his 2020 re-election campaign. In a statement, the Trump campaign said Parscale will lead “advanced planning” for the 2020 effort and that the campaign will also be engaged in the 2018 midterm elections, which are shaping up to be a challenging environment for Republicans.
President Trump has left little doubt about his intentions to seek re-election. He filed the paperwork to organize his re-election committee on the same day as his inauguration, held his first campaign rally on 18 February, 2017, in Florida, and has mused publicly about would-be Democratic challengers. Parscale, an Austin, Texas-based digital consultant and ally of Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, ran the Trump campaign’s digital operations in 2016, which included sophisticated social media targeting. He previously worked for the Trump Organization.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.